I have before me a set of flash cards, sent by helpful people at Oxford University Press. They are, the cards promise, "a fun way for your child to learn the letters and sounds that make up words". Before the child can learn to read, they instruct, he or she must learn "to say the sound that is represented by each letter or group of letters" and also "sound out the word, eg c-a-t, sh-o-p, s-t-r-ee-t". So I have a drawing of a polar bear, puffing away (do polar bears puff?) and, beneath, the words "blow the snow". On the reverse of this card, I have, in large letters, "ow" which, I am informed, is a "stretchy sound". Then I have another card, with blow, snow, slow, show, know and flow.

These are "green words". There are also red words, challenge words, speed sounds, and pink and purple banners. There are stories, too, in which, for example, a gingerbread man ran away from Dan, past a cat and a man in a van, and then got on Fran's pram.

This is the latest method for learning to read which, to older folk, will be uncannily similar to the method once used almost universally, and then unceremoniously rejected - amid much mockery of Dan, Fran and the cat who sat on the mat - around the time of the Beatles' fourth or fifth LP. It comes from Read Write Inc and, the accompanying leaflet explains, it is "Proven Synthetic Phonics as seen on Channel 4".

Its author is Ruth Miskin, a former primary school head and star of several TV programmes on reading, including a Channel 4 series last autumn called Last Chance Kids, which the Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin described as "one of the few documentaries that have made me cry".

Rival methods

Like all advocates of phonics, Miskin is riding high just now. Research in Clackmannanshire found that, given 16 weeks of phonics when they start school, children's reading scores shoot ahead. In 2006, Sir Jim Rose, a former Ofsted man, reviewed the evidence for the government and concluded "high-quality phonic work should be taught as the prime approach in learning to decode [to read] and encode [to write/spell] print". Ministers agree and, since September, schools have been expected to teach phonics in the early primary years. But for decades, reading had been the forum for fierce, highly politicised battles between advocates of the rival methods. And fighting still rages: last week, National Union of Teachers leaders, hoping for more "magic moments" in classrooms, called for alternative methods of teaching reading.

Miskin, at 51, is now a full-time missionary for her phonics scheme, which, she says, is the only one (out of more than 20 on the market) that offers schools a full training course on how to implement it. She can be alarmingly direct. "Do you do shorthand?" she demands, as I bring out a recorder. She is also wary. Which is hardly surprising, given not only the intensity of the reading wars but also her past as the one-time partner of Chris Woodhead, chief inspector of schools until 2000 which, her less generous critics suggest, assisted her rise to prominence. One teachers' union leader sarcastically dubbed her and Woodhead "the first family of education".

Miskin's professional reputation is based on her success in the late 1990s as a head in Tower Hamlets, a deprived area of London with a high Asian population. Children who scarcely spoke English at home forged ahead in reading: every child who started in the nursery or reception classes got to level 4 by 11. Nobody I spoke to questioned her success or her charisma. "She grips children and grips teachers," said Henrietta Dombey, emeritus professor of literacy in primary education at Brighton University. But former colleagues from Tower Hamlets say there is something of the prima donna about her and that she is no team player. "She isn't very interested in hearing other people's theories and looking at other people's successes," was one comment.

Dombey, moreover, argues that, on its own, Miskin's approach is simply not adequate to teach children to read with comprehension. "Less than 50%of the commonest words in English are accessible by a purely synthetic phonic approach," she says. Like many other reading specialists, Dombey objects to Miskin's insistence that phonics, and phonics alone, must be used.

Miskin responds that she is well aware that English isn't like, say, Spanish, which has almost a one-to-one correspondence of sounds and letters. "Look, it's not like we've got the most transparent language in the world. But if English isn't phonic, what is it? It has a million words and you can't teach them all one by one. English isn't the best phonetic language, but it does have a code. For years and years, we just weren't teaching it."

Miskin admits that she, too, was once a sinner. When she started teaching, primary teachers, particularly younger ones in the inner cities, believed phonics bored children witless and turned them off reading. "I was there with them," says Miskin. "We threw out all our scheme books, not just phonics books but anything that had a system." As acting head of a school in Dorset, she was enthused by the "real books" movement, which argued that children should read proper books, with rich and varied language, instead of stilted primers. "And at the end of the year," Miskin recalls, "our results had dipped. I was really ashamed. I said: never again will I let that happen. I said to everybody: look, we're going to keep what we love about real books, which is reading stories to the children, getting them engrossed, da-de-da-de-da. But we're going to teach them to read."

The trouble was, she didn't really know how. She used a bit of look-and-say and a bit of phonics but, crucially, she also brought back reading schemes and insisted everybody in the school should do the same thing. She followed the same practice when she got headships in Plymouth and Leeds.

Then her unusually peripatetic career took her to Tower Hamlets. (She has also taught in Shropshire and Leicester, and most moves, she says, were because she was following a succession of male partners.) There, she found, her old methods "weren't doing it for me". Even a bit of look-and-say held back children to whom English was a second language. "You're asking children to work out words they've never seen or heard before. That's when the crunch comes." Her conversion to a pure phonics system followed.

Many children, she says, will learn to read whatever you do. But children who lack home advantages desperately need phonics. She refused to follow new Labour's national literacy strategy. It was, she argues, a compromise between warring camps in the reading wars, so that each got a slice of the literacy hour. "It was a nightmare," she says, and admits that Woodhead - not directly responsible for the strategy but obviously influential - was nagged (her word) about it at home.

The route to real books

So was she categorical that there should be nothing but phonics, and giving children other reading material would muck them up? "No! All I say is: don't make a child read a book they can't read. While we're teaching them this nightmare alphabetic code, we should give them simple books to read, but the richest books to hear. Phonics is just the quickest route to reading real books. The thing is, if you learned reading easily, you don't really remember how you learned. But if you struggled, you'll always remember the torture. I want to spare children that torture."

And how does she cope with words such as "could" and "yacht"? These are "red words". She explains: "I keep them out of the picture as long as I can. We bring them in gradually and try to do them phonically as far as possible. We say to the children: look, you're going to have to put more effort into these red words." Of course children won't have to spell out c-a-t all their lives, she adds. Words eventually go into the orthographic store, or long-term memory, and the trick is to find the best and quickest route for getting them there. "For red words, it has to be a rather circuitous route."

Converts make the most zealous missionaries, and Miskin admits she loved being part of the with-it "real books" brigade. She had been "an outrageous teenager" - she won't, despite much prompting, elaborate - who dropped out of grammar school at 16. "I just turned off." Thanks to her father, a teacher like her mother. she got through A-levels and went to teacher-training college, "which was awful and I hated it". She really wanted to go to art college, "because I was good at art and so I didn't need to do any work".

Her misspent youth, she says, greatly reduced her choices in life. "I've always felt sad about not having those choices. And I suppose that's made me a better teacher, because I can't bear the thought of children opting out. My teachers knew I was opting out and they never pulled me back, they just kept putting me down a stream. So I've always looked out for the kind of children you might lose."

Miskin is eloquent and convincing, and I'd have been happy to entrust my children to her. But I wouldn't be so foolish as to take sides in the reading wars. Magic bullets for reading failure come and go. Perhaps Miskin's bullet is the real McCoy, but my hackneyed conclusion is that only time will tell.